Samira Shacklehttp://www.newstatesman.com/samira-shackle
enhttp://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2015/02/what-behind-resurgence-aap-india-s-radical-anti-corruption-movement
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The Aam Aadmi Party, led by Arvind Kejriwal, has won 67 out of 70 seats in Delhi’s elections.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2015/02/488952055.jpg?itok=JQqapV8-" width="510" height="348" alt="Leader of the AAP Arvind Kejriwal at a rally in Varanasi in May 2014. Photo: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images" title="Leader of the AAP Arvind Kejriwal at a rally in Varanasi in May 2014. Photo: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Leader of the AAP Arvind Kejriwal at a rally in Varanasi in May 2014. Photo: Kevin Frayer/Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
This week, something amazing happened in India’s capital city Delhi: a radical anti-corruption, anti-establishment party won a landslide victory in the state assembly elections. The Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party, led by Arvind Kejriwal – a self-proclaimed anarchist – won 67 out of 70 seats. The last three went to Narandra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It was the BJP’s first major setback since it won its own landslide victory in national elections last year. Delhi’s 20 million voters have given the AAP an astonishing mandate to rule. “This is a victory of the people, a victory of truth,” said Kejriwal in a speech to a crowd of supporters. “I hope that we can make it a place where the rich and poor peacefully co-exist.”</p>
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This is not the AAP’s first astonishing victory in Delhi elections. In the December 2013 state assembly polls, the party made an impressive debut, and Kejriwal became chief minister (as he looks set to do again). However, he lasted only 49 days in power, resigning after his anti-corruption bill was blocked by opposition politicians. This short-lived spell in power was hugely undermining, and the party – initially hailed as the great new hope for Indian politics – performed very poorly in the 2014 general election.</p>
<p>
The AAP’s astonishing comeback is largely due to Kejriwal’s campaigning tactics. He launched his bid to regain Delhi as early as July, with an on-the-ground, personal campaign, which saw him go to every area and slum in this sprawling metropolis to beg forgiveness for resigning in haste. The prevailing sense in India is that politicians are aloof and arrogant, so this ground-level atonement was highly effective. Kejriwal and his party, then, are clearly capable of winning elections. But what is this party actually pledging to do, and where has its support come from?</p>
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The AAP has its roots in India’s anti-corruption movement. Kejriwal was active in the protest movement that gained traction in 2011 and 2012, working closely with the prominent activist Anna Hazare. The party was born out of a disagreement with Hazare and other activists, who believed that the movement should be kept politically neutral. Kejriwal and his followers argued, instead, that direct involvement with politics was necessary. The AAP was formally launched in November 2012 and was officially registered by the Election Commission in March 2013.</p>
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On its <a href="http://www.aamaadmiparty.org/why-are-we-entering-politics">website</a>, the AAP sets out its grand aims: “Our aim in entering politics is not to come to power; we have entered politics to change the current corrupt and self-serving system of politics forever. So that no matter who comes to power in the future, the system is strong enough to withstand corruption at any level of governance.”</p>
<p>
Of course, vague promises to stamp out corruption are not enough to govern Delhi, a complex megacity beset by inequality and major problems with water, electricity, housing, air pollution, and traffic. The AAP’s manifesto sets out its roadmap for Delhi. Its commitments include self-rule for Delhi’s neighbourhoods, with hyper-local committees in charge of decisions about schools, health centres, and food banks; a 50 per cent reduction in electricity bills, although the manifesto does not say how this would be achieved; a range of measures to improve safety for women, including better street lights and transport services; universal access to affordable drinking water; reductions to the cost of everyday living, with measures such as cutting the cost of private education and health care.</p>
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These are all admirable promises, and they have clearly struck a nerve with a major cross-section of Delhi’s population. The AAP won more than half of the popular vote; the highest of any party in Delhi ever. This suggests that support for the AAP came from across different socio-economic and religious groups. Kejriwal has always remained popular with the underprivileged voters who make up around 60 per cent of Delhi’s population. But it seems that it was not just the poor and religious minorities, such as Muslims, backing the AAP, but also the Hindu majority and the professional classes. Some of these voters are reportedly anxious that the BJP has failed to control its radical fringe of Hindu hardliners.</p>
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For all the appeal of the AAP’s message, the manifesto is noticeably scant on detail. During Kejriwal’s last stint in power, he was accused of behaving like an activist rather than a politician – one notable example was when he slept in the open for two nights to pressurise the federal government to grant him more control over the city police. There is also the fact that rather than seeking alternative strategies or compromise, he chose to resign his whole cabinet when his anti-corruption bill was blocked.</p>
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Kejriwal’s supporters – and there are clearly a lot of them – argue that he is chastened by this early failure in office, and that he has learned from these mistakes. With the BJP’s rival, Congress, in tatters (this is the first time it has failed to gain a single seat in Delhi, after ruling India for most of its 67 years as an independent state), there are hopes that the AAP could eventually lead a coalition that opposes Modi’s right-wing, economically liberal government.</p>
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The AAP sees its aims as bigger than that. One senior official, Ashutosh (who only goes by one name), told journalists:“The administration is the easy part. Our mission is to change the political culture here, provide a model where an ordinary common man is encouraged to become a stakeholder in our democracy and that is a big, huge challenge for us.” Whether it can be achieved this time round remains to be seen.</p>
<ul><li>
<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/05/narendra-modi-man-masses"><strong>Now read William Dalrymple’s profile of Narendra Modi, man of the masses</strong></a></li>
</ul><p>
</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 13 Feb 2015 09:30:18 +0000Samira Shackle222696 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2014/12/two-years-after-infamous-delhi-gang-rape-india-s-women-still-aren-t-safe
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India is only just beginning to understand the scale of its sexual violence problem. The public discussion in the wake of the Nirbhaya case has been encouraging, but until it translates into action, little will change.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/12/460545326.jpg?itok=EY_lVQLx" width="510" height="348" alt="Activists commemorate the second anniversary of the Delhi gang rape. Photo: Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty" title="Activists commemorate the second anniversary of the Delhi gang rape. Photo: Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Activists mark the second anniversary of the Delhi gang rape. Photo: Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
One recent October afternoon, as the intense heat of a summer in Delhi waned to a more bearable 30 degrees, a golf tournament took place at the Delhi Golf Club, a members’ club situated on 220 acres of prime real estate. A few stalls were set up around the grounds, with different vendors promoting products to the people gathered to watch. One stall in particular, with a banner saying “The Safe Women Foundation”, caught my attention. It was selling a luxury women’s magazine, thick and glossy, full of fashion shoots and beauty adverts. Alongside the book, for the cost of 100 rupees (£1), was a book called Women 24 Secure: a woman’s guide to personal safety.</p>
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“Every Indian woman steps out of her house with the fear of being followed, harassed or molested,” reads the introduction. “She finds herself unsafe til the time she returns back home.” Over 100 pages, the book lists a huge range of safety measures, such as not going out at night, making sure that not many people know if you live alone, varying your route home from work, and taking particular care in car parks. It goes on to detail some eye-popping self-defence moves, with full photographic guides: “pull hair and strike”, “crouching girl, hidden tigress”, and “head-butting” are just a few. “Instead of being stunned by a pervert grabbing your breast, stun the pervert,” begins one set of instructions, which shows how to block a would-be groper’s hand and elbow them in the face. Another section explains how to use belts, spray deodorants, stones, and forks as makeshift weapons.</p>
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Aimed at urban professional women, the book is a clear indicator of the way in which women in India’s major cities feel under siege daily from sexual harassment and violence. “I carry pepper spray with me, I don't walk anywhere by myself except inside a mall, I don't go out alone at night, and I don't take taxis,” says Leia Sharma, a piano teacher who lives in south Delhi. “I don't know any men who do any of those things.”</p>
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Sexual violence in Delhi has been hotly debated ever since a brutal gang rape in 2012. The assault happened on 16 December, when a 23-year-old physiotherapy student was travelling home from the cinema with a male friend. They were picked up by a private bus of the type that frequently circles Delhi’s streets. Over the course of several hours, the girl was violently raped by six men, including the driver, and she and her male friend were badly beaten. They were left for dead on the side of the road. The woman, widely known in India as “Nirbhaya”, or “fearless one”, died from her injuries 13 days later, while receiving emergency treatment in Singapore. The sheer extent of the violence was shocking, generating national and international headlines.</p>
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Wide scale public protests soon followed in Delhi and other major cities in India, with thousands of demonstrators berating state and central governments for failing to protect women. Insensitive comments from government ministers and other officials did nothing to quell the public outrage. “I have not seen a single incident or example of rape with a respected lady,” said one of the defence lawyers in the case. In the aftermath of these mass protests, the government assembled a judicial committee to recommend legal reforms, and in early 2013, the Criminal Law Amendment Bill was introduced. The changes set out in this new law included the establishment of fast-track courts to deal with rape allegations and new legislation against sexual harassment, voyeurism, and stalking. The so-called “two finger test”, widely used to test whether rape victims were virgins, has been outlawed. Separately to the legal reform, the perpetrators in the Nirbhaya case were, ten months after the attack, found guilty of sexual assault and murder. Four of the five were sentenced to death by hanging, which is highly unusual in rape cases. (The fifth was a juvenile and not eligible for the death penalty; the sixth committed suicide in prison).</p>
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It has now been two years since this brutal assault shocked the world. Were these reforms the actions of a government desperate to show they were taking action, or have they resulted in lasting change?</p>
<p>
Karuna Nundy is a Supreme Court lawyer and the co-author of the Womanifesto, a six-point plan for improving women’s rights distributed at the last election. “One of the biggest changes since those protests is that the idea of patriarchy as separate from men became quite widespread,” she tells me when we speak on the phone. “All those people coming out into the street showed that this is not just a women’s problem, this is not a gender issue – it’s a larger democratic issue. Government exists in large part to make sure that people can be free of violence from each other. That’s one of the fundamentals of the social contract.”</p>
<p>
However, Nundy and other feminist campaigners are quick to point out the shortcomings of the 2013 legal changes. The new law did not outlaw marital rape, which accounts for the majority of sexual assault in India (and elsewhere in the world). Introducing fast-track courts is a largely decorative measure; these cases are heard by the same courts and judges, and are therefore afflicted by the same problems of resources and time. There simply aren’t enough judges to hear the cases, and no-one wants to see the standard of trials reduced. The introduction of the death penalty for sexual assault is also seen as problematic by many feminists, who object to the idea that rape is worse than death. And there’s a basic issue to be addressed before legal changes are even considered. “Implementation is a problem,” says Nundy. “If you implement the law just the way it is, even though its flawed, violence against women would go down dramatically.” Existing legislation against dowry payments and gender-selective abortions is rarely enforced due to a poor rule of law across the board and undersized, corrupt police forces.</p>
<p>
But the impact of a shift in mindset is demonstrable. Indian government statistics show that in 2013, there was a 35 per cent increase in the numbers of rapes reported. The number is expected to increase again in 2014 – although an estimated 90 per cent of rapes still go unreported. There is also a far greater media focus on such incidents. It is difficult to open a newspaper in India without reading about an atrocity against a woman: honour violence, gang rape, abuse of young girls. After the December 2012 protests, there was a period of national soul-searching about why these crimes were so commonplace. Part of the reason is demographic: gender-based violence in India starts before birth. Gender-selective abortions and female infanticide are widespread, to the extent that the male-to-female population ratio is 0.93 (worse than it was in 1970). Child marriage, teen pregnancy, and domestic violence are extremely common. And patriarchal attitudes are normalised. A 2012 report by Unicef found that 57 per cent of Indian boys and 53 per cent of girls between the ages of 15 and 19 think wife-beating is justified. In many rural areas, tribal justice and feudal practices continue, including the routine use of gang-rape as a way to settle scores. In a population of over a billion people, there are huge gulfs between rich and poor, rural and urban, and from state to state, but a restrictive and patriarchal morality is a common thread. In urban centres such as Delhi, women are more independent than ever before and do not live under the same restrictions as women in less developed areas. Yet for all these greater freedoms, women still live with the constant threat of sexual violence– the National Crime Records Bureau says that 93 women report a rape in India every day, with the largest number in Delhi.</p>
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The Centre for Social Research (CSR) is situated above a bank in Vasant Kunj in south Delhi. A framed poster outside its office is emblazoned with the slogan: “Let’s embrace change and restructure gender relations”. Among other things, the organisation trains the police in gender sensitivity, and runs a rape crisis centre. “That there is violence against women is now established fact,” says Amitabh Kumar, the CSR’s head of media and communications. “Before the 16 December protests, there was a lot of hypocrisy. Today, even if people don’t believe there is a problem, there is social pressure to agree with it – the norm has changed. Even if it’s a superficial change, that means that a generation down, your son won’t have heard you saying women are asking for it.”</p>
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This has gone right up to the highest echelons of government. “Our heads hang in shame when we hear about rapes,” said newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a speech in August. “Why can't we prevent this? When a daughter steps out, parents demand to know where she's going. But when a son returns home, does anyone dare ask where he is coming from? He might have been with the wrong people, doing wrong things. After all, a person raping is someone's son. Why don't parents apply the same yardstick of good behaviour for their sons as for their daughters?”<br />
Yet for all this increased public discussion of violence against women and the need for protection, women still do not feel safe. The Delhi Metro system has ladies’ only carriages, but many say this offers scant protection. “I would never take the Metro on my own,” says Sharma, the piano teacher. “Friends of mine have taken the Metro and men have tried to assault them in public on a crowded train.” When I last visited Delhi, relatives excitedly told me about the introduction of the mobile phone taxi app Uber. The app identifies your driver by name and license plate, and your journey can be tracked on GPS, so it was seen as a safer option than hailing a cab on the street. That changed this month, when almost exactly two years after the Nirbhaya assault, a woman was allegedly raped by an Uber driver. The government response was to ban internet taxi apps. This is evidence of what many see as misguided policy making; a desire to be seen to be taking action, without thinking through the most effective way to make changes. “A lot of it is just lip service,” says Nundy. “When someone in public life says something horrible like ‘boys make mistakes’, political parties slam him. But in terms of what action has been taken, it is just bits here and there.”</p>
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The Forum to Engage Men (FEM) is an organisation that works with men to counter gender injustice. Its offices are in the affluent Delhi district of Saket, in the basement of a hostel for young single women who have migrated to the city for work. These “working women’s hostels” are a government initiative to provide safe accommodation in convenient locations for women who need to live away from their families because of work, a reflection of the changing face of India.</p>
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Satish Singh, the head of FEM, has been working with men on gender issues for over a decade. In 2002, he started a network called Men’s Action for Stopping Violence Against Women, and he runs gender sensitisation programmes in rural areas of India, teaching men in villages to treat their wives better and break out of traditional gender roles. His work has had considerable success; in the areas he works, men eschew domestic violence and help with cooking and childcare. This kind of fieldwork is revolutionary, but the idea behind it – that masculinity needs to be addressed if there is any hope of reducing gender-based violence – is gaining currency, particularly in the two years since the December 2012 protests. The hyper-masculine ideal still dominates in India, but there have been some high-profile attempts to counter it. In October, Vogue India ran a short film online, starring renowned actress Madhuri Dixit. “We teach our ‘tough boys’ not to cry, but instead we should teach them not to make women in their lives cry,” read the promotional blurb.</p>
<p>
“Men have the privilege in a patriarchal society, but they also have to pay the cost of that privilege,” Singh tells me over a coffee in his basement office. “In South Asia, men have to be protector, successor, leader of the family, and take all that burden. In one way this centralises the power, in another way it brutalises men. Not all men are able to be protectors. Then they are not men because they are not successful. We have to address this idea of masculinity.”</p>
<p>
The perpetrators in the Delhi case all lived in impoverished areas and were, in differing ways, victims of the structural violence of inequality. This does not justify their actions, but it does contextualise them. A stereotype in India is that people in Delhi, particularly men, are aggressive. According to Singh’s analysis, men who feel emasculated by their inability to succeed – which, in fact, is due to failings of education, social mobility, and employment opportunities – act out their masculinity in an ever-more aggressive way.</p>
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Many campaigners in India speak of a confused attitude to sexuality. Bollywood movies and imported films and TV series from America depict romantic and sexual relationships, but this is not accompanied by proper teaching or discussion of how relationships should work. Singh suggests that traditional codes of modesty and morality, which prohibit sex outside marriage, and strictly proscribe female sexuality, have confused the whole notion of consent for many young people. “All women are taught in South Asia that they can’t say yes. So women always say no, and men always believe that no means yes. Men don’t like it when a woman easily says yes to a sexual relationship, as they believe it means she is of loose character, and men believe their masculinity is only accepted if they are sexually violent. In South Asia, people have sex but no sex education.”</p>
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The Nirbhaya case was not the first brutal gang rape to shock India. The previous July, a 17-year-old girl in the north-eastern city of Guwahati was sexually assaulted by around 20 men. The incident was filmed by a passing TV crew and later broadcast. There was national outrage. Nothing changed. Around the time the Delhi gang rapists were being sentenced, a 22-year-old photojournalist was gang raped in Mumbai. Her attackers, too, were sentenced to death. But what of the structural factors that led to these attacks taking place?</p>
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Sexual violence and violence against women is a global problem, and many of the issues that Indian campaigners describe are common to countries all over the world: a lack of funding for crisis centres and counselling, police refusing to record cases or making victims feel uncomfortable, a lack of female officers. “The police are generally very harsh,” says Dorothy Kamal, a rape counsellor for CSR. “People are afraid of them.” India’s police forces are chronically overstretched; and misogynistic social norms still dominate, for all the current public discussion. “Recognising the problem is positive, but when it comes to solutions, we are still grasping in the dark,” says Kumar.</p>
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Most agree that it will take time, above all else, for social norms to change. Feminist campaigners are pushing for the adoption of a broad public education programme about sex, relationships, and consent, but this seems a long way off given the repressive morality that still dominates public life. “I’d like to see citizenship classes in schools where you learn what it is to be a girl and a boy, and how it’s a social construction,” says Nundy.</p>
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Until the public discussion translates into meaningful social change, women still live with the mindset illustrated by the booklet I picked up at the Delhi Golf Club: “Even with all the strength she embodies, a woman remains afraid to walk down a street or enter an empty house on her own.” Those with the funds to do so travel everywhere by car, and those who do not must simply manage the risk.</p>
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“I remember seeing a comic strip about how a feminist fantasy is to be able to go out for a walk in the middle of the night,” says Nundy. “It doesn’t sound wild – but it speaks to that deep desire for freedom. A lot of women are realising that freedom in their minds, and realising that is something that should happen.”</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 17 Dec 2014 09:55:41 +0000Samira Shackle219071 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2014/12/pakistan-fear-has-become-mundane-will-peshawar-attack-change-anything
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Over a hundred people are dead, many of them children. Even in the terror-stricken context of Pakistan, this attack is shocking.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/12/460541208.jpg?itok=7bEdkvLK" width="510" height="348" alt="Soldiers protect schoolchildren rescued from the site of the attack. Photo: A Majeed/AFP/Getty Images" title="Soldiers protect schoolchildren rescued from the site of the attack. Photo: A Majeed/AFP/Getty Images" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Soldiers protect schoolchildren rescued from the site of the attack. Photo: A Majeed/AFP/Getty Images</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
By now, you are probably familiar with the bare facts of the case. This morning, at around 10am local time (5am GMT), militants wearing army uniforms stormed a school in Peshawar, a violence-wracked city in Pakistan’s north-west. They killed children and teachers, taking others hostage. At present, the death toll stands at 126. The majority of the dead are aged between 12 and 16. Scores more are injured, and according to spokespeople for the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which carried out the attack, hundreds are being held hostage – although the numbers are not verified. The Pakistani army says it has killed six terrorists and is searching for more. The operation is still ongoing.</p>
<p>
The Army Public School and Degree College teaches the children of military personnel as well as the children of civilians. The TTP says the attack is revenge for the Pakistani military’s current operation in the tribal areas of Pakistan; it claims it attacked a school “because the government is targeting our families and females”. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced since the military operation began in June. Operation Zarb-e-Azb (literally, “sharp strike”) aims to attack the power structure of the TTP and associated groups, and to clear out the militants’ safe haven once and for all. Since the start of the offensive, Pakistan has been waiting for the reprisal attacks that the group promised.</p>
<p>
But even in the blood-soaked context of Pakistan – a country that has lost well over 40,000 innocents to terrorist attacks since 2001 – this morning’s incident in Peshawar is shocking. It is difficult to match the sheer horror and senselessness of the mass slaughter of children. Perhaps aware of the potential damage to its cause, the TTP has said that its gunmen have been instructed “not to kill minor children”; scant comfort for the families of the scores of older children who have already been murdered.</p>
<p>
The attack is shocking, but it fits into a wider picture. Terrorism exists to create terror; the feeling that nowhere and nothing is safe, that the very fabric of daily life is under attack. Nowhere is that more evident in Pakistan, a country where health-workers and schoolchildren come under direct attack, where bomb attacks and kidnappings are so frequent that incidents with a low death toll barely make the news, and where public space has become a tense and uncertain terrain. Violence is the constant background music to life, and for the most part, people focus their energies on getting on with things, readjusting their routines – again – to guard against the latest threat. Fear becomes mundane, just another facet of daily life.</p>
<p>
Occasionally, there are large-scale incidents, inventive in their brutality, that jolt this apparently unshockable nation. There was the shooting of Malala Yousafzai in 2012, the huge bomb attack on a Hazara Shia snooker hall in January 2013, a spate of assassinations of polio vaccinators that began in late 2012, the bombing of a church in Peshawar in September 2013. Each of these incidents prompts a period of national mourning, a public outpouring of grief, and the question: how much more can we take? There are condemnations from politicians and promises of action. (In this case, the prime minister Nawaz Sharif pledged to personally oversee the operation against the TTP: “These are my children and it is my loss”). And then, in the face of weak state institutions that lack the capacity to take control of the situation, and security forces that do not speak with one voice, very little actually changes. Gradually, as people focus their energies on coping and taking whatever steps they can to protect themselves, things return to business as usual – until the next big scale attack comes around and the country is left reeling and traumatised, again.</p>
<p>
The question now is whether this incident will actually change anything. There is a chance that the sheer brutality of the event will answer some of the internal political debates about how best to tackle the terrorist threat. As recently as spring, the Pakistani government was pursuing talks with the Taliban, even as violent attacks across the country surged. Many in the mainstream political right wing still agitate for appeasement and negotiations rather than a military operation. And amongst the wider population, there is a fault-line of people who explicitly or tacitly support the actions of the TTP and associated groups, even as they suffer the effects of this campaign of terror. Some commentators have suggested that the sheer brutality of this assault will undermine the arguments of those who would like to see negotiations with the TTP, and will perhaps reduce that element of support amongst the wider populace. The group is seeking the destruction of the Pakistani state as its minimum, and speaks only the language of violence. That is no starting point for a meaningful settlement.</p>
<p>
The Pakistani government has announced three days of national mourning. In Peshawar, the process of grieving is only just beginning. The city, located in the restive province of Khyber Pakhtunkwa and is situated not far from the militant-plagued tribal areas and the border with Afghanistan, is well used to terrorist attacks, but this incident surpasses the day-to-day violence it has become accustomed to. The horror is crystallised in the fact that local media has reported that the city is running low on coffins.</p>
<p>
Culpability for the attack is with the TTP, but also with the authority figures who have given these groups the space to flourish and grow. As Peshawar prepares to bury its dead children, who will stop more from meeting the same fate?</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 16 Dec 2014 13:26:01 +0000Samira Shackle218921 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/sport/2014/10/rebirth-women-s-football-more-century-it-s-game-worth-watching
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The FA is out to make women’s football the second most popular sport in the UK, displacing men’s cricket and rugby union. Samira Shackle explores the long history of the game, from munitions workers in 1917 to the first salaried national players just a few years ago.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/10/495111865.jpg?itok=CV351pWu" width="510" height="348" alt="Arsenal Ladies celebrating their 2014 FA Cup win. Photo: Getty" title="Arsenal Ladies celebrating their 2014 FA Cup win. Photo: Getty" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Arsenal Ladies celebrating their 2014 FA Cup win. Photo: Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
On Sunday 5 October, fans filed into the Meadow Parks football stadium in Borehamwood, a town in the south Hertfordshire commuter belt. The sun was shining, and the stalls half full, as the match between Arsenal Ladies and Liverpool Ladies got underway. It was a different crowd to that usually seen at football matches; mostly made up of families – fathers, daughters, grandparents. At a few points during the game, the Liverpool fans started up a chant but it never lasted long. Apart from the occasional shout from both sides of “go on!” or “come on ref!” there was near silence, apart from cheers and claps for the goals. On the home fans’ side (Borehamwood is the home of Arsenal Ladies; though it is nearly 13 miles from the famous Emirates stadium) sat a row of primary school aged girls clad in the red football strip of Arsenal, watching avidly as the players worked their way to a 3-3 draw.</p>
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Like most games in the Women’s Super League (WSL), the highest league for women’s football in the UK, there were around 5-600 spectators. It was a healthy showing in this small stadium, but no comparison to the tens of thousands that turn out to watch Arsenal or Liverpool men’s teams to play in Premier League matches. Could women’s football ever match the men’s game? During the London Olympics 2012, the England-Brazil women’s match saw Wembley Stadium packed out with 70,000 fans, while millions more watched it on television.</p>
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Partly prompted by this success, the Football Association (FA) has launched a five-year plan to revolutionise women’s football. It aims to make it the second most popular sport in the UK, after men’s football – displacing men’s cricket and rugby union, which are currently the second and third most popular. The plan is to achieve this through a combination of growing the sport at the grassroots, professionalising the top levels of women’s football, and investing in growing the fan base and public awareness.</p>
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It has been nearly a decade since the FA’s president, Sepp Blatter, declared that “the future is feminine”, but progress has been slow. A recent survey of women working in the football industry found that two-thirds had experienced sexism at work, while more than a third believed they were underpaid compared to male colleagues. Despite these continuing issues within the industry, there have been major improvements in terms of female participation. Back in the 1990s, there were only around 80 women’s football teams across the UK; there are now thousands, meaning that more women and girls have access to the sport.</p>
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Kelly Simmons is the director of women’s football at the FA, where she has worked for over 20 years. We met in her office at Wembley Stadium, at the back of a huge open plan office of FA staff. “When you tell people that football is the most popular sport for women in England, and the fourth most popular sport overall, people are surprised,” she says. “My generation of women was offered netball, hockey, and rounders at school. It’s this generation coming through where more have had the opportunity to play in school and local clubs. Surveys suggest there’s still half a million women who would like to play football and don’t. There’s no reason why we can’t invest more and close that gap.”</p>
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Another strand of the FA’s strategy is to split the commercial rights to men’s football and women’s football; previously the television rights were lumped together and women’s games got lost in the mix. Now, BT Sport and the BBC show top women’s games. There is also an attempt to professionalise the sport at the top levels; for years, women’s football ran mainly as an amateur, voluntary-led sport, with even those playing at national level doing so for free, or for very little money. In 2009, England put 18 of its top players on central contracts. There are now 26 England players paid an annual salary, and WSL teams pay their top players too. When central contracts were first introduced, England players got £16,000, a sum described by the football union’s chief, Gordon Taylor, as “embarrassing”. It has since been upped to £20,000. Players are allowed to work up to 24 hours a week in a second job. Critics point out that male Premiership League footballers earn more than that in a day, but others argue that there is no point making this comparison. “Men’s football is 150 years old and a multibillion pound industry so I don’t really compare the women’s game to that,” says Simmons. “It’s about turning what was amateur into a professional sport.”</p>
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While it is certainly true that women’s football lags far behind men’s in terms of prestige, funding, and commercialism, however, it is inaccurate to think – as many do – that it is a new sport. Women’s football first made a splash in England in 1895, when the Ladies’ Football Association was founded by women with links to the burgeoning suffragist movement. “There is no reason why football should not be played by women, and played well too, provided they dress rationally and relegate to limbo the straitjacket attire in which fashion delights to attire them,” Lady Florence Dixie, the head of the association, wrote in a letter to the <em>Pall Mall Gazette</em> in 1895. It was controversial to see women playing football, which meant that matches (there were two teams, “north” and “south”) were attended by several thousand people. But it wasn’t to last; the Ladies’ Football Association soon fell apart because of organisational issues.</p>
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Over the next few decades, after the formation of the FA in 1863, the men’s game evolved into a professional sport that paid its players and attracted big crowds of spectators. It soon became a money-making operation. When the First World War began, men went to war in their droves, leaving behind a deficit in all industries, including sports. The war revolutionised gender roles across the board – at least temporarily – and women took up work in factories. It was at the munitions factories, mainly those in the north-east and north-west of England, that women’s football really took off. Teams of factory girls began to play against each other, initially in novelty events to raise funds for the war effort. In the early stages, some games featured women in comedy costumes, or playing with one arm strapped behind their backs. Gradually, though, the game became more serious. Structured competition was introduced and dozens of teams formed. By September 1917, 14 teams had registered for the Munition Girls’ Challenge Cup. The Cup final at Ayresome Park drew 22,000 spectators, with the money raised continuing to go towards the war effort. Certain teams became famous, and played with increasing seriousness. The team that came to dominate the sport was called the Dick, Kerr’s Ladies (named for the factory in Preston, Lancashire, where the women worked). The team toured France and appeared regularly on Pathe newsreels.</p>
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<img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/images/1921_Dick%2C_Kerr's_Ladies(1).jpg" style="width: 510px; height: 299px;" /></p>
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<em>Dick, Kerr Ladie</em><em>s FC in 1921. Photo: WikiCommons</em></p>
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Even after the war ended in 1919 and men returned home, women’s football continued to be immensely popular. Crowds attended matches in their thousands, while charities competed for the favour of top teams. In 1920, the Dick, Kerr’s Ladies played 30 games – more than any professional men’s team played in the same period. A famous 1920 match at Goodison Park in Liverpool (home of Everton FC) between the Dick, Kerr’s Ladies and another top team, St Helen’s Ladies, attracted 53,000 spectators. A further 14,000 fans were turned away.</p>
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The sheer numbers show that there was no question of the public’s continued interest in women’s football; but the political tide began to turn. The idea began to re-emerge that it was a threat to women’s health and morality to play football. In December 1921, the FA banned women from using any professional stadiums. “Complaints having been made as to football being played by women, the Council feel impelled to express their strong opinion that the game of football is quite unsuitable for women and ought not to be encouraged,” it said, in a statement that also alleged financial corruption within women’s football.</p>
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On top of the fact that women factory workers were gradually leaving their jobs and returning to the domestic sphere, this ban dealt a serious blow to the game. The English Ladies’ Football Association was formed soon afterwards and created a league of 57 teams, but it was strictly amateur. Its successor, the Women’s Football Association, was formed decades later, in 1969. Under the WFA, women’s football continued, with a national England team and a premier league. However, limited resources and the fact that it was a voluntary-led organisation restricted its development; even at the top levels, matches were often cancelled or rescheduled. “Player pathways” – whereby talented young players are scouted through grassroots football teams and get involved in increasingly elite training from a young age – are well established for boys, but for girls, were practically non-existent.</p>
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It was only in 1992 that the FA decided to lift its ban on women and bring the women’s game under its formal control. This was despite an international recommendation in the 1970s for all football authorities to incorporate the women’s game, and the passage of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 (the bill included a clause exempting sports).</p>
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Most agree that it has been positive for women’s football to be brought under the auspices of the FA. “The WFA did a brilliant job as a voluntary organisation, but the amount of human and financial resources the FA could put behind women’s football was a major change,” says Simmons. The FA established player pathways, worked to improve access to football for girls in schools, and established centres of excellence for talented girls to receive more intense training.</p>
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Faye White, one of England’s top female footballers until her retirement in 2012, lived through the changes. “I started playing with my brother and his friends, until I joined a local girls’ team in Horsham when I was 14,” she tells me when we speak on the phone. “That was the first awareness I had that there were other girls who wanted to play. I didn’t even realise there was an England team.” Through playing with her local team, White was scouted for England in 1995, and joined Arsenal Ladies in 1996. She spent the rest of her career playing with both, and served as England captain in 2002.</p>
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The day-to-day life of a top female footballer has little in common with that of a top male player. Initially White lived in Horsham and worked as a fitness instructor, travelling to London’s Highbury one evening a week to train with Arsenal, and going all over the country to play matches at weekends. She took unpaid leave from work to play for England in international tournaments. Around 2005, she moved to London so that she could be closer to the club and train more regularly. Arsenal gave her a job as development officer, a role that could be slotted around her match commitments. In her last few years as a player, she was one of the England players given an annual salary.</p>
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White thinks there has been a positive change over the course of her 17-year career. “The perception has changed. When I started, there was the stigma that it was tomboyish, a butch game, whereas nowadays people are more open to it. There’s still a lot of work to do – every boy thinks it’s just natural to play, whereas it’s not that accessible to all girls around the country – but it’s a lot better than when I started.”</p>
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<em>Faye White playing for England in 2010. Photo: Getty</em></p>
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Despite these positive changes, however, there remains a perception amongst much of the public that women’s sport in general – and particularly football, given the popularity of the game – is inferior to men’s. “That’s not about sport, that’s a thing that happens in society – the idea that women can’t do XYZ because women are better at ABC,” says Carrie Dunn, an academic at the University of East London and co-author of the forthcoming book, <em>The FA Women’s Super League: its history, governance and impact</em>. “Women’s football isn’t necessarily the same game as men’s football. It’s played on the same pitches and it’s 11-a-side, but you probably get a slower game and get players running with the ball more. But you get different levels and standards of men’s football, and people still go and watch. Just because it’s not equivalent to Premier League football doesn’t mean it’s not a valid sport or not worth watching or investing in.”</p>
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Although there have been marked improvements in coverage, WSL games are not standardly covered by national newspapers, and televised games are sporadic and shown at irregular times. All of this makes it harder to grow the fan-base. While editors argue that they will not cover women’s football until there is evidence that readers are interested, women working in the industry argue that this is self-defeating. “The sports pages still cover county cricket, and many more people attend WSL games than county cricket,” says Dunn.</p>
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The differences in the women’s game – not just in terms of physicality but the very structure of the sport – is something that feminist academics have highlighted as a possible reason for the FA’s long hostility to the game. In her book, <em>The Dick, Kerr’s Ladies</em>, Barbara Jacobs argues that the grassroots origins of women’s football posed a threat to the male power structures of the FA: “Women's football was something they were powerless to control. It has sprung up as the spontaneous expression of free-spiritedness by the lower orders, in a totally different way from that in which men's football had developed. Men's football had initially been a game for gentlemen which had only later, after its control by the FA, turned into a rough-house performed for the working classes by the working classes, which they and they alone paid to see while the owners and investors pocketed the proceeds… But in women's football there were very few rich men, just a lot of common factory women. There was no League structure, no hierarchy, no fees paid to accountants, no skimming off dividends, no affiliation to a professional body. Women's football was random and organic… It was out of control, and it was a bad example to set the nation as a whole, which was already rebelling against the old power structures.”</p>
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A contrast can be drawn to America, where women’s football – or soccer – did not spring up randomly and organically, but is an organised, fully professional sport. Like other sports in the US, women’s soccer benefited from the passage of Title IX in 1972, a rule that mandates equal funding for women’s athletics programmes in college. This led to the formation of women’s soccer teams at universities; a national team followed in 1985. The US, not a traditional football-playing country, dominates international women’s football.</p>
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Leanne Champ is currently a football coach in Boston. She moved to the US in 2012, after spending her career playing for the Millwall Lionesses, Arsenal Ladies, and Chelsea Ladies. Like White, she had to work alongside playing throughout her footballing career in the UK. During her time at Chelsea, she was a postwoman, waking up at 5am to work and then training in the evenings. Later, at Arsenal, she took a job in the club laundry.</p>
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“The States has always been way ahead England in terms of the women’s game,” she tells me over the phone from her home in Boston. “Especially this year, the US League is on a par with the men’s game in terms of the level.” She suggests that women’s football in England may suffer from comparison to the men’s sport, given its immense popularity. “It’s our biggest sport in England and everyone compares, saying that women are not the same as men. In America, I’d say women’s soccer is more popular than the men’s. It’s not perceived as ‘a girl playing football’ – it’s more that girls play football, guys play football. You just respect the game.”</p>
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She describes the frustration felt by some women footballers in the UK, who mostly still work part-time to support themselves, even if they receive annual salaries from their clubs. “If you’re playing for the highest level for your country and you see what the men get – it’s just crazy to think how different it would be if you were a guy. But it’s going in the right direction.”</p>
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<em>Supporters of the US women’s soccer team at a match against Russia in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2014. Photo: Getty</em></p>
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The women’s league in America is currently in its third incarnation, as the National Women’s Soccer League; it has previously folded twice after paying very high sums to its players. The NWSL, founded in 2013, caps player salaries, so it is no longer the draw for international players that it once was – but it still stands out from other countries as a fully professional women’s football league. (By comparison, women’s basketball in the US is equivalent to women’s football in the UK – semi-professional, with women’s teams often affiliated to men’s teams). Perhaps surprisingly, many British female players do not want to see the astronomical money paid to male footballers emulated in the women’s game. “It’s great that amounts are going up for female players in this country, but it has to be realistic and in step with the number of people coming through the door,” says White. “It can spiral out of control.”</p>
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Most people working in women’s football feel that things are moving in the right direction, regardless of comparisons to men’s football. “The finances and resources are increasing in the game and we’d love it to be increased more to give the players opportunity to be fully-fledged professionals,” says Mark Sampson, coach for the England women’s team. “But for us it’s not about being jealous of the men’s game, it’s about working with what we’ve got, making the best of it, and trying to increase it.”</p>
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White recalls that when she first played for England, there was no kit custom-made for women. “We had to wear the men’s kit. It was so baggy and oversized, but it was the best we could have. Now it’s all tailored to women. Nike, Puma, Umbro, they’re all sponsoring the top players and producing kits for them.” The little girls in the audience at Meadow Park had clearly taken advantage of this; one 8 year old wore a kit bearing the name “Stoney”, for Casey Stoney, captain of Arsenal Ladies and England star. An England-Germany women’s match in November will take place at Wembley Stadium, harking back to the 1921 match that drew such huge crowds. After years in the shadows, women’s football is coming back. </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 17 Oct 2014 11:43:54 +0000Samira Shackle214216 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2014/06/kenya-al-shabab-using-terror-way-destroying-economy
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The group’s long-term strategy is to destroy Kenya’s reputation as a safe tourist destination, damaging its economy and weakening its ability to successfully fight terrorism in Somalia.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/06/78871191.jpg?itok=2Drqt1Qq" width="510" height="348" alt="The beach in Mombasa, Kenya. Photo: Getty" title="The beach in Mombasa, Kenya. Photo: Getty" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The beach in Mombasa, Kenya. Photo: Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
The beach was deserted. Not just typical low season – slightly quiet, as you’d expect – but truly not another soul in sight. White sand, strewn with seaweed, stretched as far as the eye could see. It was an instant, brutally visible, result of international terror alerts.</p>
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On 16 May, the British Foreign Office warned that there was a “high threat” of terrorist attacks on the Kenyan coast. Tour operators First Choice and Thomson Direct <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27434902">cancelled flights and evacuated 400 British tourists</a>. The decision to evacuate was mainly due to insurance concerns but it was high profile and understandably caused panic among other holiday-goers. The US, Australia, and France also issued travel warnings about Kenya’s coast, particularly the area surrounding the coastal city of Mombasa. The hundreds of cancellations stretch all the way to October.</p>
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A week after the alerts were issued, I was in Watamu, a small tourist village not in the area covered by these terror warnings. Booking the trip from Nairobi, my friends and I scoured the Foreign Office’s online map for the parts of coast not covered in the red that indicates that you should “avoid all but essential travel”. To reach many coastal resorts, you must fly to Mombasa – the centre of the high alert zone – but Watamu is accessible via the tiny airport in Malindi. Yet still, the restaurants were empty, bar one or two other people. Hordes of taxi drivers aimlessly drove up and down the streets, with no one to collect.</p>
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The fact that not everywhere on the coastline is considered a high risk has not helped tourism. Flying from Nairobi to Malindi, I flicked through a local newspaper. It said that 7,000 people had been laid off from seasonal tourist work in the single week that had passed since the evacuations. One evening, walking back to our villa along a silent, pitch-black street, a car slowed down next to us. “I just wanted to make sure you’re alright,” a man shouted from inside. “Can I drop you somewhere? You don’t have to pay.” In Watamu, those who had kept their jobs were anxious to make sure we – practically the sole tourists in the town – were not wanting for anything.</p>
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A week after I left Kenya, two days of violence in the coastal village of Mpeketoni and the surrounding area, close to the Somali border, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-27908296">left 60 people dead</a>. Militants armed with guns and explosives slaughtered 48 people on the first day alone. Despite its proximity to the popular luxury holiday destination of Lamu island, Mpeketoni was not a tourist town but a local village. The intelligence services were right to expect something; but it was not a hit against western interests.</p>
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Responsibility for the attack has been claimed by the Somali Islamist group, al-Shabab. The group is battling the government in neighbouring Somalia, and has been responsible for a series of terror attacks in Kenya over the last few years. The most high profile of these was the assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi in September 2013. The siege lasted four days and left 67 people dead. Since then, there have been frequent bomb blasts in Kenya’s major cities. Al-Shabab, which still controls sections of Somalia despite being pushed out of the major cities, says that this terror campaign will not end until Kenya withdraws its troops from the country.</p>
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The aim is not just to create terror and a loss of life, but to damage the country’s economy. Attacking the tourist industry, which makes up around 12 per cent of the economy – second only to agriculture – is one way of doing that.</p>
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The Channel 4 reporter Jamal Osman<a href="http://www.channel4.com/news/kenya-al-shabaab-westgate-somalis-muslims-crackdown-makaburi"> recently described </a>a conversation he had with an al-Shabab commander in 2010:</p>
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To explain al-Shabaab’s long-term strategy, the commander used an animal analogy. “Do you watch animal programmes on television?” he asked me. I nodded.</p>
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“You sometimes see a lion bringing down an elephant and killing it. That proves size doesn’t always determine the winner.</p>
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“We are not as big as our enemies, but with the right tactics we can win the war. We need to choose the weakest one, isolate, confuse and just follow what lions do.”</p>
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The commander said their aim was to destroy Kenya’s tourism sector - and hoped it would have a knock-on effect.</p>
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There will be less money to pay soldiers and buy weapons to fight us. Unemployment will rise. There will be crisis. Eventually the elephant will get tired and give up the fight.”</p>
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Somewhat ironically given the current state of affairs, Kenya’s military incursion into Somalia was partly triggered by al-Shabab’s effect on its tourist industry – when it kidnapped a British tourist from Lamu in 2011. Many now are asking why the state could successfully fight terrorism in Somalia but appears unable to do so within its own borders. Weak security intelligence, endemic corruption among police and all levels of government, and poor anti-terror policies (which have so far focused on indiscriminately rounding up members of Kenya’s large Somali community), all have a part to play.</p>
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Ministers have made a series of statements aimed at reassuring tourists that they are taking action. But with Kenya swiftly losing its status as a safe haven in the region, al-Shabab’s strategy seems to be starting to take effect.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 20 Jun 2014 10:12:23 +0000Samira Shackle203466 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/06/people-karachi-airport-attacks-show-once-more-fear-has-become-fact-life
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It is mind-boggling that such an audacious attack should be possible in such a major airport in a major city. What does it say about the state of Karachi, and of Pakistan, that it was able to happen at all?</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/06/450315370.jpg?itok=177Wu-7E" width="510" height="348" alt="Smoke drifts over grounded planes at Jinnah International Airport in Karachi after the attacks. Photo: Getty" title="Smoke drifts over grounded planes at Jinnah International Airport in Karachi after the attacks. Photo: Getty" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Smoke drifts over grounded planes at the airport in Karachi after the attacks. Photo: Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
Every time I fly through Karachi’s Jinnah International airport, I am struck by the sheer volume of security checks. Your bag is scanned and ticket checked before you enter the airport, then again when you check in, and again before you go through to departures. Of course, if metal detectors made that much difference to terror attacks, Karachi would hardly have any: the city is dotted with the things. They stand incongruously outside bakeries, mobile phone shops, malls; a sort of comfort blanket against the dangers outside.</p>
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Around midnight last night, around 10 Taliban gunmen launched an attack on the airport. Wearing military uniforms, they shot their way into the facility. And of course – what good is a metal detector when someone is armed with guns, rocket launchers, grenades, and suicide vests? There were dramatic photographs of planes on fire (subsequently, it transpired that the fires were simply near the planes). It was reported that militants had hijacked one; it has been suggested that this was the aim but that it was ultimately unsuccessful. Terrified passengers trapped on planes on the runway tweeted about their predicament and desperately phoned home. Security forces battled the gunmen all night. In total, at least 28 people – including the 10 or so militants – were killed. The operation to secure the area is ongoing.</p>
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What does this say about the state of Karachi, and of Pakistan? Firstly, it should be noted that this coastal megalopolis is not just the biggest city in Pakistan, but one of the biggest in the world. Home to around 25 million people, it is the economic hub of Pakistan and one of the most important cities politically. It is mind-boggling that such an audacious attack should be possible in such a major airport in a major city. To their credit, security forces were fast on the scene, but how did it happen at all? This comes at a time when the conservative government is emphasising the need for peace talks with the Taliban. Once again, this incident raises the question that many outraged commentators have posed: what is there to discuss? And where do discussions begin when one party seeks the destruction of the state as its basic starting point?</p>
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Secondly, terrorism aims – as its name implies – to create terror. As I sat in London last night, watching the news and running through a list of friends and relatives in Karachi and their travel plans, I certainly felt that. But in much of Pakistan – particularly Karachi, a city beset by more than three decades of political and terrorist violence – people live in a chronic state of fear. It is mundane and normalised, a boring fact of life that hovers in the back of people’s minds and becomes more acute only when incidents like this raise the stakes. When I lived in Karachi I was struck by how people’s energies are directed simply towards getting on with things. Rioting breaks out, or a terror attack, or sectarian violence, and the first response is not panic, but how to get home, how to check on friends and family, and how to ensure that basic needs will be met. In this way, the fear is not debilitating, it is simply – tragically – a fundamental fact of life.</p>
<p>
Today, recriminations will start. There have been reports that some of the gunmen were Uzbek, which provides a neat excuse for those within Pakistan who wish to deflect the debate away from the country’s very real homegrown militancy problem. Already, many are asking – with some justification – how the security agency failed to deflect such an attack. On social media last night, many were distressed: “I don’t know how much more of this we can take.” For people in Karachi, and across Pakistan, this is just one more assault on their right to a normal life.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 09 Jun 2014 09:05:36 +0000Samira Shackle202316 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/04/my-heart-aches-syria-i-don-t-think-people-think-about
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>
While 2.6 million Syrians have fled the country, few have so far come to Britain. Yet the current anti-immigration climate ignores the desperate circumstances of those forced here.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/04/481950951.jpg?itok=4wmD3rQK" width="510" height="348" alt="No way home: Syrian refugees sleeping outside the Centre for Temporary Stay of Immigrants (CETI), in Melilla, Spain, 2 April. Photo: Getty" title="No way home: Syrian refugees sleeping outside the Centre for Temporary Stay of Immigrants (CETI), in Melilla, Spain, 2 April. Photo: Getty" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">No way home: Syrian refugees sleeping outside the Centre for Temporary Stay of Immigrants (CETI), in Melilla, Spain, 2 April. Photo: Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
Ruqaiya was in her final year of university when she realised she couldn’t go home. In London on a student visa, she had missed the worst of the fighting in her hometown of Damascus: after the revolution began in March 2011, her family had told her not to come back for the holidays.</p>
<p>
In May 2012, gearing up for her exams, she received terrible news. “My brother, who works in Germany, called to say that our father had been killed in an airstrike and the house destroyed. My mother had fled with my aunt to Jordan. Suddenly I didn’t have a home.” On the advice of an uncle living in the UK, Ruqaiya claimed asylum.</p>
<p>
Since the Syrian civil war broke out, well over 100,000 people have died. More than 2.3 million have fled Syria, mostly to neighbouring countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. A further 6.5 million are internally displaced. This refugee crisis – the biggest since the Rwandan genocide in 1994 – is placing a huge strain on countries in the region. In Lebanon, 1.2 million Syrian refugees now make up a quarter of the population.</p>
<p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Yet Europe’s borders have remained largely closed. According to a recent report by Amnesty International, just 55,000 Syrian refugees (2.4 per cent of the total) have claimed asylum in the EU. These low numbers are at least partly to do with the difficulty of getting into Europe. There have been multiple reports of “pushbacks” at the coast in Italy and Greece; where boats of refugees are literally not allowed to land.</span></p>
<p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Amid mounting international pressure, the UK government said earlier this year that it would take in 500 of the most vulnerable Syrians – about 0.02 per cent of the refugee population. “Quite rightly, the government has come to the view that we cannot just turn our backs on those who have fled their homes in fear of their lives,” says Anita Vasisht, a partner at Wilson Solicitors LLP, a firm that has represented many Syrians who have made it to the UK. “But when set against the scale of the crisis, the proposed resettlement remains drastically inadequate.” Germany has accepted 10,000.</span></p>
<p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">The resettlement programme is not the only way that Syrians can reach the UK. For the past 18 months, between 50 and 100 individual Syrians claimed asylum here each month; a very low number compared with past conflicts. “We have had hardly any increase in asylum applications from Syrians, compared with the spikes we saw, for instance, during the Iraq war,” says Russell Hargrave of Asylum Aid. “Those who have claimed asylum in the UK tend to be from higher socio-economic backgrounds; people with connections or wealth.”</span></p>
<p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Some, like Ruqaiya, were already in the UK when they claimed asylum. Others have used their initiative. Khaled, 40, is a political journalist and a long-time dissident. Over coffee in central London, he vividly explains the reality of living in a police state. “Many people were dissatisfied with the regime, but they were afraid to speak out because the Ba’ath party controlled jobs, and everything else.” He describes the Syrian state as “Father Christmas”: “It has a long list of everything you have ever done. So if you are arrested, they already have a body of evidence against you.”</span></p>
<p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">This moment came for him after the uprising. Wanted by the state, dead or alive, Khaled applied for temporary work visas to different European countries, and was granted one by the UK. He arrived at Heathrow in early 2012 and immediately claimed asylum.</span></p>
<p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Both Khaled and Ruqaiya have been granted refugee status, meaning they can stay in the UK for five years. But the struggle is not over. International law dictates that refugees can be reunified with their immediate family, but both are struggling.</span></p>
<p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">“My mother is stranded in a camp in Jordan,” says Ruqaiya. “She has diabetes and she can’t always get her medication. There are problems on both sides – here in the UK there is an issue about whether I can bring my parent here because I am over 18, and in Jordan there are many different authorities.”</span></p>
<p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">One reason that the UK is resettling only 500 refugees from Syria is the current anti-immigration climate and the government’s pledge to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands by 2015.</span></p>
<p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Yet this rhetoric ignores the desperate circumstances of those forced here. “I was hysterical when I came,” says Khaled. “Even after everything, I wanted to go back to Syria. My friends reminded me I would face torture and death. It is like a shipwreck – my original country is the ship and I floated here on a plank of wood. I have no option.” He is grateful to the UK for giving him a safe haven, but speaks of the difficulties. “Here, they protect rights, and in Syria, those who defend rights are forced to leave. So you have a preconceived idea of Britain as a democratic state, a welcoming place with technology and infrastructure. But it is bewildering while you are waiting for a decision.”</span></p>
<p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Ruqaiya, resident in the UK for three years before claiming asylum, is acutely aware of attitudes. “It was strange for me to change from being a foreign student – who pays high fees and is seen to help the economy – to being an asylum seeker, which is like a dirty word. When you hear the word ‘refugee’, you don’t think what it means. It means you have nothing, not even refuge, a place to call home. My heart aches for Syria. I don’t think people think about that.”</span></p>
<p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">While the number of Syrians claiming asylum in Europe has thus far been low, this could change. “Every year, the number of people making it to Europe has been increasing,” says Sharif Elsayed-Ali, head of migration and refugee rights at Amnesty. “It is likely more people will make it across this year, particularly after late March, when the weather improves and the seas are calmer. This remains extremely dangerous.”</span></p>
<p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">As desperation encourages risky and expensive routes across Europe, Amnesty and other groups are calling on governments in the EU to increase their resettlement pro</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">grammes. “The UK is giving a lot of money to the humanitarian effort, which should continue,” says Elsayed-Ali. “Starting with 500 is huge for each person that is resettled – but this is the biggest humanitarian crisis in modern history. Surely the UK can do a bit more.”</span></p>
<p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Vasisht agrees. “We cannot sanely bundle this together with day-to-day immigration policy and border control. It must be viewed as an opportunity to honour one of the greatest of British traditions – providing sanctuary for those who have fled persecution.”</span></p>
<p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Khaled, adjusting to his new home but struggling to find work, still dreams of Syria. “I am like a 40 year old tree, planted and grown on Syrian land – in winter, spring, summer and autumn. Never in all those years did I think I would leave that land and come somewhere else.”</span></p>
<p>
</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 29 Apr 2014 08:40:35 +0000Samira Shackle201489 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/2014/03/losing-and-saving-face
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>
Around 1,500 cases are recorded every year but the real figure is probably far higher.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/04/2014%2B12acid.jpg?itok=FpFPHlFR" width="510" height="348" alt="Victims of spite: acid attack survivors at an anti-violence rally in Dhaka. (Photo: Rex Features)" title="Victims of spite: acid attack survivors at an anti-violence rally in Dhaka. (Photo: Rex Features)" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Victims of spite: acid attack survivors at an anti-violence rally in Dhaka. (Photo: Rex Features)</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
Naomi Oni had left work and was on her way home to Dagenham, east London, when acid was thrown in her face. The attack took place in 2012 when she was just 20 years old. Oni is still undergoing painful skin grafts to rebuild her face.</p>
<p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">In an emotional interview on Radio 4’s </span><em style="font-size: 11pt;">Today</em><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> programme on 24 March, Oni, now 22, spoke of her isolation. “I didn’t choose this,” she said. “I’m only human.” She labelled the Metropolitan Police as incompetent: they initially suggested she had thrown acid on herself. They later charged Mary Konye, a former friend of Oni’s, with the attack; she was found guilty in January and jailed for 12 years.</span></p>
<p>
Acid violence has been in the headlines after several high-profile cases. Last August, Kirstie Trup and Katie Gee, two British 18-year-olds, suffered a random attack in Zanzibar. The previous January, the Bolshoi Ballet’s artistic director Sergei Filin was assaulted by one of its principal dancers.</p>
<p>
Worldwide, about 1,500 cases of acid violence are recorded every year, according to Acid Survivors Trust, but the real figure is probably far higher. And the sheer brutality of acid attacks – which take seconds to carry out but can cause permanent disability, as well as excruciating pain and disfigurement – makes them unusual and noteworthy.</p>
<p>
It has been suggested that attacks are increasing in the UK but a lack of reliable statistics makes this difficult to verify. NHS statistics recorded 105 hospital admissions for “assault by corrosive substance” in 2011-2012, but this category covers not only acid. That contrasts with 44 admissions in 2006-2007. There is no ethnic or geographic evidence to back this up, but some reports suggest that honour crimes in south Asian, south-east Asian and East African communities are responsible for the increase.</p>
<p>
Certainly attacks are prevalent in south Asia, but they also happen in Cambodia, Vietnam, Colombia, Peru and elsewhere, including the UK and the US. It is a kind of violence that transcends cultural and religious borders, but is most common in places where acid is readily available. In south Asia, where regulation is poor and acid is used in the cotton industry, a bottle of the stuff can be bought for 20p.</p>
<p>
The crime has a long history in Britain. In the 1740s, when sulphuric acid was widely available, acid-throwing happened often. In the 1830s, one Glasgow periodical wrote that acid violence had “become so common . . . as to become almost a stain on the national character”.</p>
<p>
Acid attacks are often a form of gender-based violence and, as such, they occur most commonly in countries where women are disenfranchised. Last year I visited the Acid Survivors Foundation (ASF) in Islamabad, the only centre in Pakistan dedicated to the rehabilitation and treatment of victims. The most striking thing about the stories of the women I met was the triviality of the causes: men taking revenge for rejected marriage proposals or husbands who got bored by their wives. It brought to mind the case of the former model Katie Piper, the UK’s most high-profile acid survivor, whose attack was orchestrated by an ex-boyfriend in 2008.</p>
<p>
There are no hard and fast rules of this crime: men can be the victims of acid attack and women can be the perpetrators. Yet the attacks are always about exerting control and erasing identity. Mohammad Jawad, a plastic surgeon who operated on Piper and who appeared in <em>Saving Face</em>, the Oscar-winning documentary about acid attacks in Pakistan, described it thus: “The attacker is saying: ‘I don’t want to kill her – I am going to do something to distort her.’ It’s a walking dead situation for the victim.”</p>
<p>
When the <em>Today</em> presenter Mishal Husain asked Oni why Konye had attacked her, she started to sob. “She is an evil person . . . No one in this world should throw acid on someone because they had an argument.”</p>
<p>
It is a natural impulse to search for the reasons for such abuse, but can there ever be a justification? To most people it would be unimaginable to lose one’s face. As Oni said during her interview, explaining oneself and being disbelieved is a second abuse.</p>
<p>
The situation for survivors of acid violence varies globally, but to differing extents all survivors feel socially ostracised. Few cultures are kind to disfigurement.</p>
<p>
“Acid attack doesn’t mean the end of your life,” Valerie Khan, the director of ASF Islamabad, told me: “provided you receive those rehabilitation services to psychologically and physically repair you, mentally rebuild your self-confidence, and empower you economically – despite the new you, which is not necessarily an easy one to be accepted with.”</p>
<p>
Acid violence is an extreme expression of control. Society can help to wrest some of that back for survivors by believing them, supporting them, providing medical treatment, and, crucially, redressing the balance with justice.</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 01 Apr 2014 11:10:53 +0000Samira Shackle201183 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/03/i-too-am-oxford-whiteboards-arent-perfect-theyre-better-nothing
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Of course, whiteboards do not have the space for the full complexity of the arguments about racial insensitivity, not do they represent everybody’s experiences, but they can start an important discussion about the micro-aggressions that make it difficult to express offence.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/03/tumblr_n27z4ua7oT1tvq0glo1_1280.jpg?itok=QZf5P7Hp" width="510" height="348" alt="One of the “I, too, am Oxford” campaign images. Photo: itooamoxford.tumblr.com" title="One of the “I, too, am Oxford” campaign images. Photo: itooamoxford.tumblr.com" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">One of the “I, too, am Oxford” campaign images. Photo: itooamoxford.tumblr.com</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>
I distinctly remember the first time anyone called me a Paki. I was at university and it was a friend, speaking in jest. He saw my shock, and assured me that “the Paki” had been the nickname for the only Pakistani boy at his school, and that “he’d liked it”. The clear suggestion was that I was being oversensitive. I let it go.</p>
<p>
In the grand scheme of racist comments, it wasn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened, but it was distressing for a number of reasons. First, that at 18, I didn’t feel comfortable standing my ground and saying more. Second, the sudden, shocking sense that people – friends – might see me not only as different, but worthy of pejorative names. </p>
<p>
It was that sense, of abruptly being “othered”, that the <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/robinedds/students-of-colour-share-their-experiences-of-life-at-oxf">“I, too, am Oxford” and “I, too, am Cambridge” campaigns</a> depict. Inspired by the “I, too, am Harvard” photo-series in the US, the campaigns feature students of colour holding up whiteboards explaining the various micro-aggressions they experience daily. “The first time anyone called me a Paki was at Cambridge,” says one. “These parts of my identity shouldn’t be mutually exclusive,” says another. “No, I am not here on an access scheme,” reads a third. You get the picture.</p>
<p>
It didn’t take long for a counter-campaign to spring up. <a href="http://wearealloxford.tumblr.com/">“We are all Oxford”</a> states on its website that Oxford has been “misrepresented” and expresses concern that “the negative portrayal of an ethnic minority student’s experience at the university will discourage prospective ethnic minority students from applying”. Their whiteboards make statements such as “the only thing the tutors care about is what you bring to the table”. In my experience, that was certainly true – but it doesn’t detract from the original campaign, which focused on other students.</p>
<p>
Of course, whiteboards do not have the space for the full complexity of the arguments about racial insensitivity, about prejudice at elite institutions, or about where curiosity ends and offensiveness begins – and nor did the original campaign pretend to. But those whiteboards serve the important purpose of articulating the small instances – the mundane comments, not always intended to offend – that are difficult to confront in the moment, but add up to a painful whole.</p>
<p>
When I saw the photographs last week, I was overwhelmed by how strongly I identified with them. Not because I had a terrible time at Oxford; I didn’t. I had a brilliant experience there, socially and academically, and would encourage anyone – state school, ethnic minority, and otherwise – to apply. But at the same time, there were moments where other students made me feel uncomfortable, as if my race was an issue that I couldn’t understand.</p>
<p>
The crux of the matter is that these things should be spoken about. After the original campaign was launched, I had some interesting discussions with fellow Oxbridge alumni. Some pointed out that comments about race were often the result of ignorance, not raging prejudice or the desire to hurt. No doubt that is often true, but that makes it all the more important to educate and raise awareness of where the boundary of acceptable behavior lies. Nor does ignorance excuse everything: the willingness to learn is also crucial. The friend I mentioned might have called me a Paki because he was not used to diversity, but it was his choice to tell me to relax rather than think about why I might be hurt or offended.</p>
<p>
If you have a lot of people from cloistered backgrounds or exclusive schools, as Oxford and Cambridge do, it is likely that some of these issues will arise. Of course racially insensitive comments are not unique to Oxbridge (I’d hope that most people reading the campaigns would recognize that) – but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be discussed at all. That’s the same mentality that says that female foreign correspondents shouldn’t speak out about sexual assault in case it discourages editors from sending women to warzones. Keeping quiet to avoid putting people off does not address the root of the problem.</p>
<p>
I still feel angry when I remember some of the things that were said to me while I was at university, and my own silence. The reason I didn’t speak up was not a desire to preserve the university’s good name, of course. It was because I was young and lacked the confidence to challenge comments that made me uncomfortable; because I didn’t want to be seen as over-sensitive or the “touchy ethnic minority” and differentiate myself more; because growing up in an ethnically diverse area of London and being fair-skinned enough to have never experienced overt racism, I had not established coping mechanisms or arguments for these situations. The whiteboards may not relate to everyone’s experience (“my voice is not the voice of all black people,” reads one). But they do kick-start a discussion that needs to be had, and – for me, most importantly – they give ethnic minority students a way of expressing the fact that sometimes it is OK to be offended.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 19 Mar 2014 10:44:48 +0000Samira Shackle201011 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/01/how-legal-aid-cuts-are-harming-voiceless-and-most-vulnerable
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Increasingly, some of the most vulnerable people in our society, such as young people in care, the homeless and migrants, are being forced to represent themselves.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles_2014/460921993_0.jpg?itok=Hk_7Muet" width="510" height="348" alt="" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Lawyers protesting outside Southwark Crown Court about the cuts to legal aid. Photo: Getty</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Liz was 16 when she realised she wasn’t coping. Her daughter, Emily, was just over a year old. Her mother – who she lived with – was an alcoholic. Taking charge of her situation, Liz contacted Emily’s father to ask if he could look after the baby, at the same time voluntarily putting herself into foster care. It didn’t work out. Emily’s paternal grandmother accused Liz of domestic abuse, and filed a legal claim for custody of Emily. Liz, by this time in foster care, did not contest the claim. But she was frightened and – like most people – couldn’t understand the wording of the legal documents or the charges against her.</p>
<p>When a court hearing was scheduled, she sought advice from a lawyer, but was told she was not eligible for legal aid because the case was a private matter. Liz, a vulnerable young person in care, could not afford lawyer’s fees. Her foster carer asked social services to help fund legal help for the hearing. Liz’s social worker said that social care could not supplement the short fallings of legal aid, although they would help her to understand the process, and highlight to the courts that she was at a disadvantage. JustRights, a youth charity, also gave Liz advice, but were not able to accompany her to the hearing.</p>
<p>Ultimately, she had to represent herself against a qualified barrister. Despite many parties being willing to help this distressed young person, doors were repeatedly closed because of drastic cuts to the legal aid budget. She was left highly traumatised by the experience.</p>
<p>Legal aid in England and Wales was established in 1949. It provides assistance to people who would otherwise not be able to afford legal representation or access to the court system. It is an integral part of the British justice system: by ensuring the right to counsel, it safeguards equality before the law and the right to a fair trial. Yet, as cases like Liz’s show, the system is under threat.</p>
<p>The coalition has already taken £320m out of the annual legal aid budget, and plans to remove a further £220m each year until 2018. The scope of these cuts is dizzying, and will affect many areas of criminal law (when a crime has been committed) and civil law (where disputes are settled). The government’s argument is that, with an annual budget of £2bn per year, England and Wales’ legal aid system is the most expensive in the world and it needs reform.</p>
<p>In April 2013, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (Laspo) came into force, with the aim of cutting the civil legal aid budget by a quarter (£320m) within a year. The bill was defeated 14 times in the House of Lords, eventually passing by a very narrow margin. For the first time, it removed legal aid for the majority of cases – with some specific exceptions – involving divorce, welfare benefits, clinical negligence and child contact. It was these changes that meant Liz was not entitled to assistance. It also removed legal aid from all immigration cases apart from asylum, and from a range of housing and benefit cases.</p>
<p>Like Liz, many of those who lose out are vulnerable people. “Family law is one of the areas worst affected,” says Camilla Graham Wood, a solicitor on the executive committee of Young Legal Aid Lawyers and an activist with the Justice Alliance, a campaigning group. “Now, for example, you can only get help in private law family cases – like contact or divorce – if you can prove domestic violence. Many people are being turned down because they don’t have a letter from the GP or anything from the police to prove abuse. This shows a complete lack of understanding of the complexity of the issue.”</p>
<p>Legal reforms – even when they have potentially devastating consequences – are not headline news, perhaps because of the complexity and wide scope of the issue. This month one aspect of the cuts – reductions in fees for criminal legal aid – came under the spotlight. On Monday 6 January, barristers and solicitors working in criminal courts staged an unprecedented walk out to protest against further reductions. Designed to save £220m per year, the proposed cut would see lawyers’ fees cut by 30 per cent. Criminal cases have already had their budgets reduced by 40 per cent since 1997.</p>
<p>In response to the walk out, the Ministry of Justice released figures showing that the median income of a criminal barrister is £56,000. The aim was clearly to paint a picture of fat cats getting rich on the state. But, as most criminal barristers attest, this is far from the truth. The figure does not take into account travel, VAT deductions, and chamber costs, and does not reflect the difficulties for young barristers, who may initially earn as little as £10,000 per year (after accruing significant debt to train). Marie-Claire Amuah, a junior criminal barrister in London, tells me that in the early stages of their careers, barristers routinely attend magistrates’ courts where they earn between £50 and £80 a day before tax.</p>
<p>“The cuts proposed put you in a position where it’s simply uneconomic to go to work,” says Paul Prior, a criminal barrister based in Leicester. “Many barristers will not take on cases like burglaries, thefts, minor assault offences, because they cannot cover their costs. That could put small, local firms out of business, and create what Chris Grayling once referred to as ‘advice deserts’.”</p>
<p>If criminal law becomes unsustainable as a profession, it is a problem for everyone, not just for lawyers. “There’s the double impact of people not being entitled to legal aid but also law centres being unable to survive and closing,” says Graham Wood. “The cumulative impact of all those things is severely restricting access to justice.”</p>
<p>Lawyers have warned that the tightened restrictions on legal aid in criminal cases (those who do not face a prison sentence are highly unlikely to qualify; nor are those who do not pass a means test) as well as in civil cases (like Liz’s) has led to an increase in people being forced to represent themselves across the board. “As a prosecutor, it is so difficult to see somebody representing themselves when they really don’t know what they’re doing,” one barrister told me. “I’ve seen people defending themselves when they clearly don’t understand the point of the trial.” The consensus is that this is ultimately a false economy, where expensive court time is wasted and unsatisfactory verdicts end up being appealed and unnecessarily moving to higher courts. “The cuts effectively take from one pot of public funds, and leave another to pay for the delay in trials,” says Amuah.</p>
<p>Taken together, the effect on both civil cases (like family law and immigration) and criminal cases (like assault or theft) is devastating. “What we’re seeing is the unemployed, the poor, the marginal, being prevented from accessing justice,” says Ben Bowling, professor of criminology and criminal justice at King’s College London. “The first thing that will happen, to put it crudely, is that people will be put off taking action against state abuses, for example. At the moment we have justice by geography and this will be justice by wealth. Allowing ‘ordinary’ people to seek redress in court is, in a sense, a way of defending the poor – and that is not a vote winner.”</p>
<p>Some of the groups worst affected – young people in care, the homeless, migrants – are also society’s most voiceless. Ellen, 16, was the victim of sexual abuse while in the care of her local authority. She needed to collect highly sensitive evidence about the abuse she suffered for a compensation appeal. Like Liz, she was judged ineligible for legal aid. Like Liz, her only option was to turn to social services – but in Ellen’s case, this was the very same local authority that had failed to protect her from abuse. This was hugely distressing, and her case floundered.</p>
<p>Since the Laspo act was introduced in April, there have been numerous cases like this. The teenage refugee who does not qualify for legal aid to apply for permission for their family to come to the UK, and is left traumatised and isolated. The victim of domestic violence who had not logged incidents with the police so cannot get legal aid for an injunction against the abusive partner. The list goes on.</p>
<p>Those with uncertain immigration status are among the worst affected. “The overwhelming number of migrants who need legal advice no longer qualify for legal aid,” says Isaac Shaffer, immigration solicitor and founding member of the Save Justice campaign. “It is not politically unpopular to cut funds for migrants, but according civil rights to one set of people but not another seems like a retrograde move, away from the principle of human rights.”</p>
<p>As the government’s plan of £220m cuts every year until 2018 demonstrates, this is just the beginning of the road for legal aid reform. In addition to the cuts to the criminal bar that were highlighted this week, proposals for future cuts include a “residency test” that would mean that only those who are lawfully resident in the UK and can prove 12 months of lawful residency will be eligible for legal aid. (This would have hugely far reaching implications, affecting victims of trafficking and anyone with uncertain immigration status, as well as adding a layer of bureaucracy that could delay or restrict help for British citizens).</p>
<p>Tom, 25, was a beneficiary of legal aid last year. A homeless young man, he was denied temporary accommodation by his local authority and was on the brink of suicide. The expert assistance of legal aid lawyers from his local law centre meant that an injunction was swiftly obtained forcing the local authority to give him accommodation. “If I hadn’t had legal aid, I would be dead by now,” he says. Yet under proposed changes to judicial review (another hotly contested area of cuts), he would not be eligible.</p>
<p>Many lawyers working in legal aid – both civil and criminal – say that this is a “tipping point” and that the system could soon become almost entirely unsustainable.</p>
<p>“The government will have to answer politically for the destruction of a system which was once admired throughout the world,” says Amuah. “Once it’s dismantled, it’s dismantled. That’s a wide concern.”</p>
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</div></div></div>Mon, 13 Jan 2014 12:01:52 +0000Samira Shackle199946 at http://www.newstatesman.com